but they are at least bound by the need to persuade you to voluntarily give them your money.

except if theres effective monopolies on things that are basic utilities in these days....
(and in my understanding large parts of the US are effectively monopolies bound to various ISPs)

i, for example, cant handle my uni interactions without an internet connection because the only way to get registered to exams is through the web portal.
so i have two ways of action there: get an internet connection or leave the uni.
which is basically giving in to one of the two possible ends of a blackmail.

yes, lower regulation produces results more favourable if theres actual competiton.
but there is a definite lack of competition between ISPs in the US from my pov

but they are at least bound by the need to persuade you to voluntarily give them your money.

except if theres effective monopolies on things that are basic utilities in these days....
(and in my understanding large parts of the US are effectively monopolies bound to various ISPs)

Monopolies are not automatically a Bad Thing. If I run a business that is so awesome on features and price and innovation that nobody even tries to compete with me, consumers prosper. Since that is the one true goal of a functioning capitalistic economic-legal system, state interference would be counterproductive.

Of course that's a very unusual situation, if not today, then tomorrow when that company starts to think it "deserves" to be the only provider. By far the more common case is some business trying to keep its prices high and its service costs low by taking actions that keep competing business from operating. My reading on this subject is that there've been only a handful of such cases by ISPs.

But the fact that this is possible is why I don't argue against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continuing to regulate ISPs for anti-competitive behavior.

I'm not opposed to all government, or all regulation -- that would be silly. My opposition is to a jot more regulation than is unequivocally necessary, into which category I personally think the Obama-era FCC's interference with completely legal business practices by ISPs fell. Once you normalize the idea that state bureaucrats can control some part of private industry because of a "maybe," where does that end? It's a really bad precedent to set.

Honestly, the weirdest part of the whole "net neutrality" thing for me is seeing the same people who'd criticize NSA employees for aggregating telephone data to identify terrorists arguing that FCC employees should be able to access ISP data to be sure they aren't charging different rates, as though there's something magically different about human beings in different parts of a huge federal bureaucracy....

Honestly, the weirdest part of the whole "net neutrality" thing for me is seeing the same people who'd criticize NSA employees for aggregating telephone data to identify terrorists arguing that FCC employees should be able to access ISP data to be sure they aren't charging different rates, as though there's something magically different about human beings in different parts of a huge federal bureaucracy....

Honestly, the weirdest part of the whole "net neutrality" thing for me is seeing the same people who'd criticize NSA employees for aggregating telephone data to identify terrorists arguing that FCC employees should be able to access ISP data to be sure they aren't charging different rates, as though there's something magically different about human beings in different parts of a huge federal bureaucracy....

Because intercepting and reading and storingthe meta- and payload data of every single packet is the same thing as large scale performance statistic monitoring?

I dont need to read every license plate to check if a road is congested or not.

I also find it interesting how you always feel the need to stress the "completely legal business practices".
currently legal doesnt mean "moral" or "should stay legal"

I also find it interesting how you always feel the need to stress the "completely legal business practices".
currently legal doesnt mean "moral" or "should stay legal"

I stress it because 1) limiting state interference with legal behavior is a good principle, and 2) the pro-net neutrality case is weakened by its proponents failing to defend ignoring this good principle.

Also, it's hard to tell sometimes whether you pick at things because you actually have a reasoned and meaningful difference of opinion about them, or if you just can't help yourself from picking at other people's views instead of putting in the effort to explain your own beliefs. You actually do a great job explaining your beliefs about Limit Theory features -- why is it so hard to do that for non-LT subjects?

I stress it because 1) limiting state interference with legal behavior is a good principle, and 2) the pro-net neutrality case is weakened by its proponents failing to defend ignoring this good principle.

I defend the principle when its valid to apply.

You also ignored the second half of my point, just because its currently legal doesnt mean that that's a good state, especially in the field of internet and computing regulations where humanity as a whole is still very much in the experimentation phase.

There are also multiple angles on how to approach the legality question.
I can argue for two basic spins ad hoc l, one to completely abolish all net neutrality and one to make it a hard requirement.
And both of them are "perfectly legal" (from my limited legalese point of view).

One is that the customer is using the ISP's private infrastructure and the ISP is perfectly in their rights to define what they want to allow on their network.
Allowing any and all favouritism and limitations they please to enforce.

The other view is that ISPs gate a gigantic amount of other industries and speech and thus have to treat everyone's traffic equally to preserve a fair and even market and platform for speech for everyone else on the internet.
(and before the argument with "but streaming providers use so much capacity!" comes up again: what are netflix & co paying their connection fees for? If not to pay for the infrastructure usage? And they are 10000000% surely not getting a deal thats below running costs for the ISP)

Im personally a firm adherent of camp B.
They themself arent generating any of the value on the internet, but are "just" enablers for everyone doing business there.
They are building roads and arent the various traders, travel agencies and so on who use the roads to produce actual economic value and have, on the grounds of providing basic necessities for everyone, no right to discriminate against one or the other legal traffic using their network.

the internet is an utility, no value in itself but to provide everyone else with functionality they need to have their devices and services work.
Like electricity, like water.
I cant sell a device if it wont work for a subset of customers i cant control and which can arbitrarily change.

what would you say if your electricity supplier decided that samsung TVs arent allowed to run anymore, or only for an extra fee?
(Which isnt as technically far fetched as it sounds with modern switched power supplies and the emergence of packet based power allocation)

the internet is an utility, no value in itself but to provide everyone else with functionality they need to have their devices and services work. Like electricity, like water.

I disagree. Just because something is a desirable public good does not automatically qualify it as a public utility (to use the correct full term).

Water provision clearly falls under the definition of "public utility." It's a finite natural resource needed for life and prosperity, and it makes some sense to entrust a public commission to oversee its use to maximize safety and fair distribution. Public sewage systems (in cities) also fall into this category, although they're more about safe distribution than generation of a resource.

Treating electricity as a public utility is somewhat less obvious, since it's generated rather than being a natural resource. For now, it probably also makes sense to treat electrical power as a utility since building plant is expensive and we move power to homes via physical wires. But suppose that twenty or fifty years from now anyone can buy a Mr. Fusion unit the size of a microwave oven. Then there is no longer any justification for treating electricity as a public utility requiring state commissioners to regulate its availability and pricing.

I think a similar argument applies now, or close enough to now, to broadband. ISPs need to pay for servers, not unlike power plants... but the cost for adding web server capacity and broadband management software is orders of magnitude less than the cost of producing more power, especially from coal and nuclear. And we can see this cost differential increasing even more as cloud services continue to explode; there's no way this technology -- delivered by private enterprise -- doesn't continue to get faster, cheaper, and more reliable for the foreseeable future. (There's already competition in cloud services, too.)

The cost for distributing electricity versus broadband is also vastly different, and that difference is also increasing. While many homes are still wired, wireless Internet access (through cellular or satellite) is clearly preferred by both consumers and ISPs, and so it too is likely to accelerate as the means of distributing broadband services, further lowering the cost of access for consumers.

These costs and trends for generating and distributing broadband services argue against declaring broadband to be a resource that requires regulation as a public utility. Broadband is not a physical natural resource; it's not even remotely as finite as water or electricity; and it increasingly has no dependence on any physical transmission lines that must be laid and maintained. Private enterprise has been doing an incredibly good job of delivering better broadband to more and more consumers. There is nothing that declaring broadband to be a public utility would do to enhance this progress, and plenty that government regulation could do to slow down this progress: companies regulated as utilities tend to be monopolies, which is the anti-competitive result that would injure the expansion of Internet access!

If broadband doesn't merit being rationed by a commission, then those who still want to defend net neutrality turn next to asserting that ISPs will censor content or financially disfavor certain content sources, to insisting that these things are wrong somehow, and to declaring that protecting consumers requires government regulators to impose content and price controls on all ISPs. Let's look at that next.

The other view is that ISPs gate a gigantic amount of other industries and speech and thus have to treat everyone's traffic equally to preserve a fair and even market and platform for speech for everyone else on the internet.

The problem with this is it makes an assumption that is both large and false: that ISPs are all anti-consumer, and there's no escape from their wicked censorship without intervention from benevolent and wise federal regulators.

If I can choose among several ISPs (which is encouraged by carefully limited but effective anti-competitive practices regulation), there is no need to tell them they can't censor whatever content they want. Let 'em! If you don't like one ISP's rules, switch to a different ISP. Or if you're really ticked, and you're totally certain that there's an enormous market opportunity for an ISP that offers a completely "fair and even market and platform for speech," you (in an economically functional nation) can start your own ISP company.

I don't claim it would be easy, or cheap. But why do we pretend it's impossible? This idea that people are helpless to solve their own problems and to cooperate to satisfy their own desires, and that the first recourse of citizens should be to appeal to distant bureaucrats, is dangerously wrong and deserves to be disputed.

Which brings me back to the point that you note -- correctly -- I have been repeating, which is that power corrupts. It corrupts for big businesses, and it corrupts for governments. The difference is that businesses can't protect their power with guns. That doesn't mean ISPs being stupid is OK; it means that fighting a bully by giving more power to a much bigger bully is a Very Bad Idea no matter what pleasant-sounding words are used to sell it.

(Note that I'm not suggesting you yourself believe your comment quoted above; you may simply be stating it as a starting point for an argument that winds up concluding that imposing "net neutrality" restrictions on ISPs is a good idea. So my response isn't aimed at you personally -- it's aimed at the unstated but important assumption being made that ISPs, free of FCC control, will all collude to stifle free speech and there's not a blessed thing that private citizens can do about that, despite the plain fact that this was not in any way a common problem in all the years before 2015 when the FCC simply decreed that broadband was a utility.)

You also ignored the second half of my point, just because its currently legal doesnt mean that that's a good state, especially in the field of internet and computing regulations where humanity as a whole is still very much in the experimentation phase.

I didn't address it because I'm not offended, and don't feel a need to argue, when someone has a different viewpoint than I do -- and even less so when someone says something I agree with.

An example of this would be the point that "legal != moral." Who disagrees with that? I don't.

But it's also irrelevant to the question of the FCC insisting it has the power to force or prevent what is, yes, the legal, normal, and necessary business practice of deciding how much to charge for products and services. If your point really is that people entrusted with state power should dictate business practices or individual behavior based not on law applicable to everyone (which while imperfect is still the best way we know of maximizing happiness in a free society) but on their personal beliefs about what is moral, then yes, we most certainly do have a difference of opinion.

And before anyone brings up "Dred Scott v. Sandford," I not only concede but insist that some laws are bad laws... but the solution that avoids injustice and anarchy is not to simply ignore laws we don't like, it is to change the law.

We have well-defined processes for changing the law. That is what the U.S. Senate tried to do. I disagree with their vote, but I endorse the process they followed and would accept the outcome if the House agreed and the President signed such an unnecessary and counterproductive bill into law. And then I would use the same legitimate process, including electing wiser representatives, to try to switch that law back to one that promotes private enterprise as the most effective means of satisfying consumer desires. Because maintaining that process, rather than encouraging powerful individuals to do whatever the hell they want, is how republics continue to remain republics.

Whew! For saying I see no value in further discussing this, I sure seem to still be commenting here.

I think I'm done again now, though. I might poke my head in to read comments, but probably won't have any more to say on it beyond this last novel.

If I can choose among several ISPs (which is encouraged by carefully limited but effective anti-competitive practices regulation), there is no need to tell them they can't censor whatever content they want. Let 'em! If you don't like one ISP's rules, switch to a different ISP. Or if you're really ticked, and you're totally certain that there's an enormous market opportunity for an ISP that offers a completely "fair and even market and platform for speech," you (in an economically functional nation) can start your own ISP company.

And as for starting a new ISP... not sure if it works that way in the US, but here, if you want to start a new ISP, you either have to do a massive investment in infrastructure no startup can afford, or you have to rent the lines from an existing ISP. You know, the one you're wanting to compete with.

I don't know what all this about homes moving to wireless is about. I know I get vastly greater data transfer rates between my ethernet-connected (i.e. wired) devices (with a gigabit switch, close to a gigabit—who knew? ) as compared to my wifi-connected devices. Latency's lower, too, unlike the FedEx truck full of hard disks. So, at least between the wired ethernet and the wireless wifi, the evidence seems to imply that, without massive cost advantage, the trend should be in the opposite direction. Perhaps it's different in internet connections than intranet, but I can't imagine cellular—much less satellite—competing in bandwidth or latency with fiber optics.
And if you suggest that a startup could use a wireless technology instead of wired, consider the costs of a satellite constellation, a cellular tower network, or enough high-power wifi routers to cover a city.

The sacred competition which allows you to do capitalism to ISPs does seem to exist in cell phone carriers. But this is because the nature of the service offered implies the kind of mobility that allows consumers to choose providers.
To be fair, my immediate neighborhood does feature three or four ISPs in direct competition to deliver broadband to homes. But even this seems anemic—four entities hardly make a robust free market, especially when contracts are involved.

I disagree. Just because something is a desirable public good does not automatically qualify it as a public utility (to use the correct full term).

but a necessity to modern life which requires expensive, complex and cooperating infrastructure to work at all.

and to which everyone has to have an as unrestricted as possible access to for it to have the optimal economic effect.
and if you yourself arent viewing it at personal necessity for your life, try cutting the access of your workplace and see what happens.

modern society doesnt work without it. at all.
its a necessity for businesses and private persons in the modern age.

I think a similar argument applies now, or close enough to now, to broadband. ISPs need to pay for servers, not unlike power plants... but the cost for adding web server capacity and broadband management software is orders of magnitude less than the cost of producing more power, especially from coal and nuclear. And we can see this cost differential increasing even more as cloud services continue to explode; there's no way this technology -- delivered by private enterprise -- doesn't continue to get faster, cheaper, and more reliable for the foreseeable future. (There's already competition in cloud services, too.)

dont confuse services that run on the network with the network.
a server is just someone's disconnected computer withtout the network.
cloud services are a pretty independent type of provider for the discussion we are having here as well. they provide computing space, not networking to your end point.

changing software on some sever doesnt change the tiniest bit about the connection's bandwith between it and an endpoint (beyond some efficiency optimisations, like multipath TCP)

The cost for distributing electricity versus broadband is also vastly different, and that difference is also increasing. While many homes are still wired, wireless Internet access (through cellular or satellite) is clearly preferred by both consumers and ISPs, and so it too is likely to accelerate as the means of distributing broadband services, further lowering the cost of access for consumers.

yeah... no.
the last mile wireless connection is the equivalent of the cable from your basement up to your devices.
important, but a very tiny insignificant part of the network behind it.

lets look at the traceroute output from my home computer to the university of houston (you live in houston iirc? so i'll assume that as representative of the amount of middlestations between you and me)

(i edited out the traces into nothing, the ones in my local network and IPs that could get you my private address)
and that arent even all the segments that actually exist inbetween, because the 2 hops from my PC to the switch in the road didnt show up. neither do the dozend other switches between there and the regional switch. neither the hundreds of other switches between the other segments.

every single of those connections is a glass fiber cable.
if you get a wireless home connection the very first one of those isnt a physical wire.
the rest of the network is still there and has to be dug out and wired through to work.
and that isnt going to become any less in the future.

if then its going to become even more with the switch to ever smaller cells (microcells) which are then themself wired up.
because the spectrum crunch is a real thing, and the smaller the cells are the more RF bandwith each has available to provide service with.

you'll see less wires on the end devices. but everything else is going to get packed ever denser with cabling.

yes, the last mile isnt free if you wire it up.
but just ignoring the whole backhaul network and claiming that new ISPs can just use wireless connections instead is

because the backhaul is wired. because nothing else has the capacity and reliability needed.

yes there are some backhaul sections that are run with wireless links. but the locations that are suitable for large scale microwave backhauls are limited and far from "just use a wireless tower!" as well

and without large scale space infrastructure i wont even acknowledge satellite as a viable alternative to cables. because satellites cost many millions apiece, have limited bandwith and produce gigantic latencies in their current form.
sats are a way to supply areas that arent supplyable otherwise, not a default backhaul.

Broadband is not a physical natural resource; it's not even remotely as finite as water or electricity

but the wireless spectrum is a very much limited and very much physical natural resource.
over which very fierce bidding wars are being fought. and ISPs encroaching on the ISM bands (which everyone can use under some non-interference conditions) in a desperate attempt to get a bit more data rate
and a hard push to [get rid of]/[compress] the wasteful TV broadcast frequency space to make room for wireless internet
of course we are developing ever more efficient ways to use that limited natural resource, that doesnt remove the fact that its limited and has to be tightly regulated to enable everyone to have an at least workable connection.

If broadband doesn't merit being rationed by a commission, then those who still want to defend net neutrality turn next to asserting that ISPs will censor content or financially disfavor certain content sources, to insisting that these things are wrong somehow, and to declaring that protecting consumers requires government regulators to impose content and price controls on all ISPs. Let's look at that next.

you mean "asserting" like tal did the last time around we had this discussion?
with links and sources on to where it actually happened?

and go ahead, show me where its not bad that private companies can determine what business im allowed to run?
because if i want to run a service thats not in favour of the local ISP im screwed. because they'll either want an additional protection racket on top of the connection fees or just quietly drop every other packet of my traffic and artificially degrade my QoS
both of which they already did. to netflix for example.

The problem with this is it makes an assumption that is both large and false: that ISPs are all anti-consumer, and there's no escape from their wicked censorship without intervention from benevolent and wise federal regulators.

they have shown that they'll utilise their powers without restraint if they think they'll get away with itas per tals link collection which you, oh so fairly and wisely, completely ignored.

If I can choose among several ISPs (which is encouraged by carefully limited but effective anti-competitive practices regulation), there is no need to tell them they can't censor whatever content they want. Let 'em! If you don't like one ISP's rules, switch to a different ISP. Or if you're really ticked, and you're totally certain that there's an enormous market opportunity for an ISP that offers a completely "fair and even market and platform for speech," you (in an economically functional nation) can start your own ISP company.

I don't claim it would be easy, or cheap. But why do we pretend it's impossible? This idea that people are helpless to solve their own problems and to cooperate to satisfy their own desires, and that the first recourse of citizens should be to appeal to distant bureaucrats, is dangerously wrong and deserves to be disputed.

go ahead, organise a fundraiser for some tens-to-hundreds of billions of dollars to pull a competitive ISP out of the ground.
because bemoaning people not being able to do stuff implies that you can do it. prove it.

But it's also irrelevant to the question of the FCC insisting it has the power to force or prevent what is, yes, the legal, normal, and necessary business practice of deciding how much to charge for products and services.

ask for whatever amount of money you want for your service.
but dont intruduce arbitrary distinctions (packets from location A being different than packets from location B) and then remove that distinction for an extra fee.
because that distinction only exists to extort more money out of people and to put competitors at a direct disadvantage.
not a disadvantage by having the better offer (ISP video instead of netflix for example) but by sabotage and active interference with their legal business.
and have people not being able to get a better offer because you are the only viable source of any form of service in the first place

If your point really is that people entrusted with state power should dictate business practices or individual behavior based not on law applicable to everyone (which while imperfect is still the best way we know of maximizing happiness in a free society) but on their personal beliefs about what is moral, then yes, we most certainly do have a difference of opinion.

i dont want regulation either, dont get me wrong.
BUT
if the good of pretty much any and all businesses on the web needs regulation of companies that build and maintain infrastructure i'll do it without much second thought.

(how to do it is a point we can happily discuss about, i'll gladly agree on the currently discussed NN regulations not being optimal. but i prefer them greatly over the hope for benevolent corpocraty. especially as those corporations have already shown that they arent benevolent)

AT&T bought Time Warner last night, and Comcast is about to buy what's left of Fox. With Net Neutrality down, AT&T is free to raise prices for Netflix, or even block it entirely in favor of its newly-acquired "HBO Go", of which Netflix is a direct competitor. Netflix doesn't have the strength to stand up to something like that. The end of Netflix may already be looming on the horizon, and after all the companies acquire each other, it's mission accomplished!

Congrats guys! High fives and beers all around! We're becoming a true dystopian cyberpunk like Netrunner, but without the netrunners!

AT&T bought Time Warner last night, and Comcast is about to buy what's left of Fox. With Net Neutrality down, AT&T is free to raise prices for Netflix, or even block it entirely in favor of its newly-acquired "HBO Go", of which Netflix is a direct competitor. Netflix doesn't have the strength to stand up to something like that. The end of Netflix may already be looming on the horizon, and after all the companies acquire each other, it's mission accomplished!

Congrats guys! High fives and beers all around! We're becoming a true dystopian cyberpunk like Netrunner, but without the netrunners!